Casey Affleck backs Massachusetts bill to protect baby monkeys
Casey Affleck is throwing his weight behind a pending bill in the Massachusetts legislature that would prevent infant primates from being removed from their mothers for research, experimentation and product testing.
The bill was filed by state Sen. Joan Lovely, D-2nd Essex, before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary. Affleck's letter is addressed to the chairs of that committee, state Sen. Lydia Edwards, D-3rd Suffolk, and state Rep. Michael S. Day, D-31st Middlesex.
Affleck's letter refers to one Massachusetts lab where infant rhesus macaques are taken away from their mothers at birth for what he describes as "the sole purpose of deliberately interfering with their visual development by sewing the baby monkeys' eyelids shut or forcing them to live in strobe-like lighting conditions."
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, described a lab at Harvard where newborns were forced to wear disorienting goggles for 18 months. Federal funding for those experiments was terminated, but PETA said it was concerned they could start again without a law on the books.
Affleck has been a supporter of PETA in the past. In 2021, he and his mother joined PETA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to protest animal testing at a laboratory there.
Affleck calls for Edwards and Day to lend their "full support to the groundbreaking bill."
"As a parent myself and someone who is close to my own mom, I find these sorts of experiments especially devastating," Affleck wrote. "As disgusted as I am to learn this was happening at all, I am grateful that Massachusetts leadership is working to make sure this horrific practice never happens again in the state."
The Oscar-winning actor is a Massachusetts native.
A hearing on Lovely's bill was held Tuesday before the joint committee.
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